Why You’re Hitting The Wrong Club: 5 Ways To Find Your Real Yardages

If there was a way to save shots without doing anything to improve your technique, you’d jump at the chance. Fortunately, there is. The reality is that far too many golfers don’t know the distances they really hit each club, or how to use that information.

Bad club selections, missing in the wrong place, poor strategy, and set configuration that isn’t optimum for your game can all cost you shots, even if you make a good swing. But once you know your actual hitting distances with every club, all of these things – and your scoring – will improve.

With the help of the brilliant statistics and insights available from Shot Scope, we’ve identified five ways that knowing your distances can be used to become a better golfer. In this article and video, Top 50 Coach Adam Harnett helps you understand why accurate yardages are so important and how you can use that information to shoot lower scores.

1. Better club selection

There’s no worse feeling than making a great swing and beautiful contact, only to see the ball finish at the wrong yardage. A good outcome for a shot depends on you having the right club, as well as making a good swing. That all starts with knowing how far each club hits the ball. You can get your yardages for each club using launch monitors like the Shot Scope LM1 or on a simulator.

If you don’t have access to that technology, or you want to add more real-world data, you can make a note of how far each club goes when you hit them on the course. That will give you a good range of shots and show what your longest and shortest are, as well as giving you an average. Recording where the shot finishes can also help you build a picture of your tendencies, strengths and weaknesses.

When you’re on the course, you can use a rangefinder or GPS to give you the exact yardage of your shot. Remember to take the difference between carry distance and total distance into account with club selection. Your average distance should be the starting point when choosing your club – not your longest shot.

Then you have to recognise environmental factors that will affect how far the ball travels, such as uphill or downhill, temperature, wind and other weather conditions. If you also record that information when noting down your previous shots, that can help you understand how they affected your distances, so you make the right choice.

2. Carry versus total distance

You really want to have two yardages for each the club – the carry is where the ball first bounces and the total is where it finishes. Carry is what you need to know to make sure you’re going over any obstacles or hazards like bunkers or water on tee shots and approach shots into the green. The total will help you ensure the ball will stop before running out into any danger, or as close as possible to the flag. In other words, carry is for flying, and total is for dying.

When you have to carry something really penal, you should completely take it out of play with your club selection. It can be tempting to flirt with it, especially if you’re between clubs, but always favour long when there’s danger short.

Vice-versa, if there’s a hazard long and it’s safer short, err towards a club that increases your chances of missing on the shorter side. This is true with tee shots as well. If you’re choosing a club to avoid running into a bunker, water or rough, make sure it definitely can’t reach even if you absolutely nail it.

3. Stop coming up short

The vast majority of players tend to underclub, with the Shot Scope data showing that golfers over a 10-handicap are more likely to miss the green short than hit it from 150 yards, and 20-handicappers will leave half their shots short from that range. Even the average five-handicapper is short 29% of the time, compared to hitting the green with 38% of their 150-yard approaches.

Most people think they hit it further than they actually do, or pick their club based on their absolute best shot with it, rather than the average. Missing the green is obviously going to hurt your scoring and a lot of holes are designed the majority of the hazards like bunkers or water short of the green.

A good way to make sure you take enough club is to get a yardage to the back of the green, as well as the flag. If you have 150 yards to the flag and 165 yards to the back of the green, choose a club that has a maximum distance of 165 yards total, rather than the club that maxes out at 150 yards.

You can also do a little game where you give yourself a point every time you get past the flag with an approach shot. That really changes how you think about these shots and enables you to measure and track how successful you’re being.

4. Avoid hazards

A good strategy takes as much danger out of play as possible and maximises your ability to score well from good shots, but also from the bad ones that we all inevitably hit during a round of golf.

The Shot Scope data reveals that finding a fairway bunker off the tee will cost the average 15-handicapper half a shot – so hitting a club that can’t go in any will help improve your scores. In simple terms, play to your strengths, avoid penal dangers, and minimise the number of times your weaknesses are called upon.

If you know your driver is bringing hazards into play off the tee, hit a club that can’t reach them, or at least increases of you hitting a straighter shot that avoids them. It will leave a longer second shot, but unless it’s a really long hole you should still be able to reach the green comfortably with the second shot.

You might actually be surprised at how little difference to the club you hit for you approach that hitting what feels like a very conservative and safe club off the tee can make.

5. Improve Your Gapping and set configuration

Gapping is the difference in yardage between each of your clubs. You want to have a consistent gap between each club – something around 10 yards is common – so you can more easily hit as many different yardages and shots as possible and there are no gaps where you don’t have the club you need for a certain yardage.

Knowing your yardages might reveal that you do have a big gap, or you have a couple of clubs doing the same thing. You should adjust your set make-up to fill any gaps. Quite often it’s the longer clubs that can go the same distance, which highlights a lack of speed in your swing or inconsistency of strike. If that’s the case, keep the higher lofted one and change the lower lofted club to something more forgiving that restores your gapping, like a hybrid or fairway wood.

At the bottom end of the bag, you also want consistent gapping in your wedges. The distance they carry is more important than the loft numbers on the bottom. Just because the lofts are evenly spread doesn’t mean the yardages will be as well. Identify the yardages you want from your wedges and get the lofts that enable you to do that. A good custom fitter will be able to help you with gapping and the right set make-up for you right through the bag.